What is the author's tone in The Afterlife by Billy Collins?

The tone of a poem refers to the attitude or stance of the speaker towards the subject matter. Collins's poem is at once comic and serious. His speaker takes a humorous stance towards the idea of life after death, treating the beliefs of others in a comic vein. Yet, the ending of the poem is elegiac. Elegies are poems or songs that mourn the loss of something or someone. Although "The Afterlife" does not mourn an individual, it does evoke the sense of loss, as evidenced in the poem's final image of "the winter trees, / . . . traced with the ghost writing of snow."